Station Eleven
Chapter 49
Summary & Analysis

LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Station Eleven, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.

Death and Survival

Faith and Fate

Civilization

Memory

Art

Summary

Analysis

The clarinet, it happens, hates Shakespeare. She has always wanted the Symphony to perform something else. A year before being taken by the prophet, she started writing her own play with the hope the Symphony could perform it. But she only ever wrote the opening line: “Dear friends, I find myself immeasurably weary and I have gone to rest in the forest.” It is this note that the Symphony later discovers and thinks might be a suicide note.

The potential suicide note is now explained as the opening line for a play that the clarinet was writing around Year Nineteen. She wants the Symphony to perform a wider range of plays, both because she doesn’t like Shakespeare and because she believes that there should be art that represents the post-collapse world.

Active
Themes

While they were reading the note, she was waking up after being drugged and taken by the prophet’s men. Around her, the prophet and his men plan a confrontation with the Symphony. The clarinet realizes Sayid is there too, angrily asking questions to the prophet, and she realizes Dieter has died. She learns that she was abducted because two hostages are better than one for the exchange of Eleanor.

While her art is misunderstood as a suicide note, the clarinet realizes that Dieter is dead. Sayid is angrily confronting the prophet’s men on the basis that their faith and actions have killed his friend. The clarinet has been abducted simply for assurance that the exchange for Eleanor goes well.

Active
Themes

The clarinet manages to make eye contact with Sayid, who mouths to her instructions on how to get back to the road. She then pretends to be asleep, but alive, so that the prophet leaves her an opportunity to escape, but she ends up falling asleep for real.

Sayid covertly tells the clarinet how to get back to the Symphony while continuing to distract the prophet’s men.

Active
Themes

When she wakes, Sayid is discussing the horrible things the prophet has made his men do with the boy. The boy seems to know it isn’t right, but feels he has no choice. Apologetically, he says that the men are highly trained and can pick off Symphony members one by one until they get what they want. During the conversation, Sayid keeps the boy distracted so that the clarinet can escape. Silently, she slips away and is able to tell the Symphony to change their route. They leave immediately, and are unable to locate Kirsten and August, who are at this point off fishing by the golf course.

The young boy feels bad about his actions, but feels like he needs to do them to survive, at least since he is under the prophet’s rule. Sayid continues this conversation in hopes of helping the boy change his ways and escape his abusers, but also to allow the clarinet an opportunity to escape. She alerts the Symphony of the prophet’s plan to intercept them, which explains the reason that Kirsten and August became separated from the group.

Active
Themes

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